


ghosts and true loves

by wishtheworst



Category: Haven - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Ending, F/M, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-06
Updated: 2012-08-06
Packaged: 2017-11-11 14:18:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/479418
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wishtheworst/pseuds/wishtheworst
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three different ways time could have reset (or failed to) on Audrey’s day off.</p>
            </blockquote>





	ghosts and true loves

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for "Audrey Parker's Day Off" (Episode 02.06)

I.

Afterward Duke blames Audrey for it, although he could never really explain how or why. It’s a long time before they can talk and longer before they can touch. At first she thinks it’s because he’s angry. That she understands because she’s angry too, unable to see the value in being bulletproof if no one around her was. It’s much later that she realizes it’s because for Duke, this is one more thing he’s taken away from Nathan without quite meaning to, the ugly pattern of their lives repeating even with one of them gone.

“Why didn’t you stop it? Before it happened, I mean.” What he really means is why did you let him go, but he almost never speaks about it that directly. He doesn’t really look at her, but then they don’t meet eyes very often these days. She adores him, like she always has, and he tries to love her enough for both himself and Nathan now, filling the void with a fierceness that feels like desperation. She can never tell if he’s trying to give Nathan back to her somehow, or looking for some trace of him left in her. And she knows he’s not entirely sure either. They pace around each other like nervous predators sometimes, and when they finally rush in she’s never entirely sure if it will be with searching hands and soft mouths or something sharper.

“You know I couldn’t,” she says. She looks right at him for the first time in a long time and sees the stamp of the intervening time on his features, how it all reshaped him ways that she can’t ever share. Audrey will be the same age forever, maybe longer, and Duke hasn’t been that young in a long time. _He looks old enough to be my father_ , she thinks. _If I had one._

He shrugs and finishes his drink. “You could have turned it back again. Like you did with me.”

She could tell him that’s not how it works, that she’s not omnipotent. Or powerful at all most of the time. Duke has always seen her as larger than life, but most of the time she feels terribly, helplessly small. Most of the time she’s not sure where her strength is and when he talks like this it drains away what little is left.

She settles for “That girl is alive. He would have done the same thing. You would have too.”

“No, I wouldn’t have.”

Finally their eyes meet, and when they do, she believes him. They don’t talk about it again. It doesn’t change anything, not really. But just like before, there’s never a time when Nathan isn’t squarely between them, as tangible a presence as when they could touch him.

II.

“They’re gone,” Nathan says to him one morning. Duke is standing at the sink washing up last night’s dishes, and the knife in his hands slips, slicing the tip of his finger when he grabs it. He doesn’t say anything, rinses it out quietly in the too hot water and wraps a dish towel around it before he turns to face Nathan. They hadn’t been talking about anything, not really, but he knows exactly what he means without explanation. The Troubles are gone. She won’t be back. Not the way they knew her. Maybe not at all. Neither of them have any idea if she can really die, but it seemed real enough.

There are a thousand things he imagined himself doing upon hearing those words, but none of them happen. He nods slowly and says “Then be careful with the coffee” before leaving in search of the Band-Aids and if Nathan notices that he’s gone for longer than that should take, he doesn’t say anything. Finally they’ve learned to give each other a little breathing room. She would have laughed, doubting their ability to learn anything at all, especially about each other. There are a lot of little things Duke thinks she probably would have liked about their lives now.

They held their unlikely arrangement together on the chance that she would come back and in the hope of having something for her to come back to. Even if she was someone else altogether they would be there, the same as they had been, when she was ready. Day-to-day life was a ritual, their words optimistic incantations meant to bring her home. But when Audrey went she took whatever magic there was with her. Now even the Troubles were gone and they’re real boys once and for all. Nothing more.

It’s a long time before he finds Nathan up on the deck and a longer time spent watching him. There’s a strong wind coming off the water and he’s holding his hand up in it, staring like he can make his body understand why it works again.

“What’s it like?”

Nathan smiles that half-embarrassed boyish smile, but it fades quickly and he drops his hand into his lap. “Cold.”

“Come inside then.”

III.

Audrey used to worry about not being quite real, being so full of ideas and memories that weren’t her own. Sometimes she imagined that all that arbitrary borrowed content was the only thing giving her form. At first she was content with the structure he and Duke scraped together around her, and then it seemed like more of the same. Hers to borrow, never hers to make.

She used to worry that when the Troubles left that Nathan wouldn’t look at her the same way because she wouldn’t be the only one with magic in her fingertips anymore. At first she didn’t want to share him with anyone, her perfect world populated just by the two of them. But then it was so easy with Duke that it didn’t feel like sharing at all. Nathan realized he could be two separate things, one for each of them, and somehow they came together like one seamless thing that smoothed out all the little flaws and rough edges in each of them. Then she worried that she would just slip out of the weave if the Troubles were gone because they wouldn’t need her anymore.

Nathan never knew how to tell her none of those things were true. If he had been able to, he could have told her that the things he felt for her had nothing to do with her ability to touch him and everything to do with the parts of her that weren’t Audrey Parker, Lucy Ripley or any of the other pieces of her puzzle. He didn’t have the words for it, but that was ok. Duke would say exactly the right thing just as Nathan’s fingers would rest at the top of her spine and she would relax finally, sure of them and herself for another day. Somehow the three of them made each other all right, and that was more than they’d had before on their own or with anyone else.

She worries about other things now and Nathan touches her the same way, tries to say all the things that Duke would have said. They don’t come out exactly right, but if she resents him for that she doesn’t mention it. She isn’t irrational and she doesn’t expect him to be himself and Duke for her, although sometimes Nathan does.

“What were you going to say to him? The day it happened?”

She asks him that every so often, apropos of nothing. It’s been months since the last time, when there was snow on the ground and the sky looked like hematite. Now it’s summer again, but the last breaths of it. Cold creeps into the air late at night and Audrey wraps an old sweater tight around herself. They should go inside – it has to be past midnight – but neither of them is motivated to move.

“I don’t know,” he answers, like he always does.

She nods and pulls herself up out of her chair, leaning to kiss him goodnight on her way inside. Tomorrow he will wake up to her in the kitchen that never gets used because neither of them is any good at it. Her hair will be pulled back in that messy bun that he likes and she’ll be making pancakes that won’t turn out, which both of them will know. She apologizes in the same way every time, not being very good with the right words at the right time either. But she can’t stop asking. Those unspoken words from that day are the one thing he can’t make her see as something for the three of them.

Nathan can’t tell her because if she knew, it would open all those old fears the three of them had sealed up back then. He had wanted to tell Duke he didn’t know how to fix them by himself, that he had to tell him before he left. But like usual, Duke had known the right thing to say.

**Author's Note:**

> _i heard that ghosts and true loves  
>  can sometimes appear where they're not  
> you told me this isn't true love  
> so whose ghost's got me caught?  
> ...  
> i know they say i'm losing track of time  
> but i've counted every minute since you were mine  
> \-- Kirsten Andreassen, "My Crazy"_


End file.
